[imagesource: Reuters / Albeiro Lopera]

The sentiment about how important the descendants of the hippos once owned by infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar has changed dramatically, from one year to the next.

First, they were celebrated for filling an ecological niche missing from the region around Pablo Escobar’s Medellin compound for thousands of years.

But when the population of these so-called  ‘cocaine hippos’ became too big to handle, environmentalists suggested culling a few to control the potential threat to the area’s biodiversity.

The debate about what to do with the hippos continued, until a court ruling filed on October 15 that essentially gave them a special legal status in the country.

A US court has ruled that Escobar’s ‘cocaine hippos’ are people, too, reported The Guardian:

Christopher Berry, the lead attorney for the Animal Legal Defense Fund [the animal rights group who put the case up against the Colombian government over whether to kill or sterilise the hippos], called it a narrow but profound ruling.

“This really is part of a bigger movement of advocating that animals’ interest be represented in court,” he said. “We’re not asking to make up a new law. We’re just asking that animals have the ability to enforce the rights that have already been given to them.”

…“Legal personhood is just the ability to have your interest heard and represented in court,” Berry said. “It’s about enforcing rights they already have under animal cruelty laws and other protection laws.”

This recognition as “interested persons” with legal rights in the US is the first time that animals have been granted such a status in the country.

The hippos live in Colombia, though, where the court order does not carry any weight:

“The ruling has no impact in Colombia because they only have an impact within their own territories. It will be the Colombian authorities who decide what to do with the hippos and not the American ones,” said Camilo Burbano Cifuentes, a criminal law professor at the Universidad Externado de Colombia.

It is difficult to know exactly how many hippos there are at present, but their numbers certainly have grown from the original 35:

The “cocaine hippos” are descendants of animals that Escobar illegally imported to his Colombian ranch in the 1980s when he reigned over the country’s drug trade.

After his death in a 1993 shootout with authorities, the hippos were abandoned at the estate and left to thrive, with no natural predators.

It is suggested that the population is now somewhere between 65 and 80:

A group of scientists has warned that the hippos pose a threat to the area’s biodiversity and could lead to deadly encounters with humans. They are advocating for some of the animals to be killed.

A government agency has started sterilising some of the hippos, but there is a debate on what are the safest methods.

With this newly implemented “interested persons” status, perhaps there is another twist in the tale.

[source:guardian]